Day #14 Hideshi Hino lets the Dead Girl Strut her stuff

For Day #14 of the Halloween Horror Challenge I stopped back into the work/studio of Japanese Madman Hideshi Hino and his THEATER OF HORROR!!!


HIDESHI HINO'S THEATER OF HORROR: DEAD GIRL WALKING (2004) D. Kazihiru Yokoyama ????? S.O.V.

Another entry in the shot for the home video market of short horror flicks based on stories by Japan's Manga comic master of the macabre Hideshi Hino (see the entry for BOY FROM HELL for details about Hino). This episode deals with a teenage girl who suddenly when morning dies without any rhyme or reason while watering her precious flower in her bedroom. the problem is that she is still mobile and moving around like normal. The local doctor pronounces her dead and her family immediately starts treating her like a pariah. They encase her room in plastic and ignore her as much as possible. But when she begins to stink they decide she is too much to bear and promptly decide to embalm her, against her will. All this does is make her mobility even worse, causing more bruising and rot to set in. So the family bonds together deciding to cremate her to get her out of their lives leading to a bedroom blood bath, that leaves her mother with one less eye and her little sister dead. Neither of which is her fault, but causes her to go on the run nonetheless. On the road she will encounter her old friends who are naturally terrified of her, an unsympathetic farmer and a charleton who wants to add her to his freakshow. All while rotting away even further.

This neat little short seems to be making some commentary on inter-family relationships and how parents can't seem to relate to their children. How they only can deal with them when they are perfect in their eyes, but there is a problem they rush to get rid of them as fast as they can. The movie also seems to be making a commentary on dealing with death as well on how some folks refuse to acknowledge it. Wanting instead to immediately get rid of every ounce of the loved one, so they don't have to feel their presence anymore. Better they should be gone for good than to feel any sort of pain or sorrow. The parents in this movie, never feel any sadness or regret at their daughter's passing. As soon as she is announced dead they immediately go to shame, and then anger without passing go. Perhaps there is a very Japanese commentary in there, but of course not being from Japan, I cannot be sure on that. The end of the movie, which I will not give away, comments on the whole circle of spirit thing, with how one cannot die, without feeding the cosmos in some way, continuing the cycle.

Stylistically this is very interesting. Even though shot on video, there is a lot of care in the look and feel of this episode. It starts out in color, and then once she dies, it goes to black and white and remains that way, except for one flashback and the final shot. The entire movie is from the dead girl's point of view as the world has been drained of all color. It is also shot and scored like a classic 1930's horror film. The dead girl becomes a classic monster ala Frankenstein or one of Lon Chaney's creations where she is put upon and hunted, though she is a pathetic creature who has done absolutely nothing wrong and deserves our sympathy. She is hunted for being different and suffering. Even the score reminds one of the movies from that era. Another nice touch is that she has no dialogue once she is dead. All she has is an internal monologue that we see as on screen inter titles, not unlike a silent film would use. So her world is completely alien and closed off, with only us the viewers being part of it.

The only thing that doesn't really work is the climax. I can see were it would have worked in a comic book (were I am sure this originated) but as a movie it comes off cheap, silly and out of place. the movie is clearly going for a tragic climax, then tries to go around it, and then circle back. Plus the digital effect used is sub-public access phony and takes you so far out of the proceedings that it is hard to get back in for the final bit, which is rather touching.


With this being a movie called DEAD GIRL WALKING I am sure the gore hounds are wanting to know if it delivers. There is some gore on hand as she falls apart, with her tongue and arm falling off. Most nasty is a scene where her colon and intestines drop out of her ass while she is on stage at the geek show. That even took me for a loop, though it is more sad than outright gross. The slaughter/ knife fight with her family at the mid-point has some arterial spray that you have come to expect in Japanese movies as well.

All in all a fun and fairly rewarding entry into this series. I'm looking forward to the rest of them.



This APHEX TWIN video for RUBBER JOHNNY doesn't have a god damned thing to do with HIDESHI HINO or this series. But it is super damn creepy and the deformed monster kid in it reminds me of something that would being one of Hino's comics. Since i can't find anymore clips on line from this series, this will have to do.




Reviews © Andy Copp

Day #13 finds Sugar on the hill...

SUGAR HILL aka SUGAR HILL AND HER ZOMBIE HIT MEN aka THE ZOMBIES OF SUGAR HILL (1974)
D. Paul Malansky
American International Pictures
1.85

This well loved Blaxploitation horror hybrid played the drive-in circuit for years and years before becoming a late night TV favorite well into the 80's. Being rated PG allowed it to play second bills safely and get into syndication with very little editing which made it a popular replay, plus the snappy and memorable various titles made an impact with audiences over the years. But what has stuck with people are two things: the cobweb-covered, bug-eyed voodoo zombies, where they used cut in half ping pong balls painted silver for eyes, and, of course, the titular badass anti-hero Baron Samedi, played by Don Pedro Colli, with his wide eyes, toothy grin, and joyful menacing laugh. His image seared its way into the stoned minds of many a drive-in patron all over the country, regardless of color or creed. But he's just the pawn of the title heroine Sugar Hill, one pissed off Mama out for revenge because a syndicate of honky motherfucka's killed the man she loved so they could take over the nightclub he ran. Being that she came from a family of voodoo practicing folk, that was one bad move on their part. She goes to her old Mama, a voodoo priestess who helps Sugar to raise the Baron and his zombie slaves. Literally, the corpses of slaves brought over from the old country, who died of disease soon as they set foot on the plantations of America and were buried in the swamps of Louisiana. Together they all set out to wipe the lily white scum (and one token black brother) from the face of the earth.

Marki Bey is Sugar Hill, and she's smokin' in the roll. Hot as can be, and, as many of the black actresses of the time often did, exuding an air of absolute control and power. She just shines forth as a woman not to be fucked with in her various white and blue power jumpsuits that amazingly never look tacky or retro on her. As the movie progresses her cleavage seems to take on a life of its own, becoming more and more prominent in each outfit, until those breasts are demanding their own screen agent. It all seems rather appropriate for a character who enters every room and takes charge of everyone in it. The movie is clever in how each scene sets up Baron Samedi in some way, as well: as a bartender, a cab driver, or a gardener, allowing the bad guys to walk to their doom as he watches them take the bait and suffer their fate. Laughing the whole time at their stupidity and cries of anguish.

SUGAR HILL is ripe with a thick atmosphere of genuine Southern gothic antiquity, with lush swamps and plantations and a feel of down-home voodoo in some scenes that's eerie, to say the least. The fog-basted scenes of Baron Samedi's resurrection are particularly effective.

The movie was formerly owned by MGM as part of their deal with American International's library (formerly owned by Orion), but I don't know what's happened to it since then. I believe it's shown on MGM's HD channel once or twice, but it's still not available on DVD as of this writing. Rips from that broadcast and the old Orion VHS are floating around, and either are a perfectly acceptable way to watch this fine 70's slice of drive-in horror fare. This one has now entered the pantheon of a real favorite.

Reviews © Andy Copp

Day #12 unleashes the Centipede Spell on your ass!

We travel to South East Asia for this gooey and nasty all you can eat treat!

CENTIPEDE HORROR (1984 credited release but actually made in the mid to late 1970's)
D. KEITH LI
????
1.85

I've been enjoying taking in some early 80's Chinese splatter cinema lately. I watched THE DEVIL a few weeks ago, probably the top of the line of these low budget nasties, and finally got around to looking at CENTIPEDE HORROR after all these years. And it's a truly nasty, creepy crawly piece of work! I quite enjoyed it and must say that there were moments in this one that made even me feel uneasy. Whoever got the bright idea of using centipedes as the main creature of destruction in this flick deserves a prize. They bring up some sort of primeval feeling of dread and unease I can't quite verbalize, but when you see those suckers moving you can almost feel it moving up your back. When you see hundreds of them scurrying to crawl over some poor bastard, you can't help but become paranoid they are all over your own floor. looking to make you the next meal on the menu!

The story here deals with a young man named Pak Lei who foolishly allows his younger sister to go to South East China on a vacation. Seems that their grandfather had forbade the entire family to ever set foot there for any reason, but since he has no longer around, the young people thought it was no big deal. Pak Lei made his sister where a medallion that was passed down from their grandfather for spiritual protection and good luck. Unfortunately, it's that very medallion that gets her ass into trouble. A street vendor spots it around her neck and puts a curse on her, causing her to be attacked in the woods by a swarm of centipedes who bite her mercilessly. Her very cute friend sees the carnage, has a heart attack, and dies on the spot.This little cutie sees these creepy-crawlies and has a heart attack and DIES!!!

Pak lei goes to his sister's aid in S.E. China when the doctors cannot figure out what disease she is suffering from, and gets there just in time to see her die from her suppurating pustules and spreading wounds. His old girlfriend from college (played by Margeret Li) assists him in finding some answers, first talking to an ointment salesman they call the King of Centipedes, since his elixirs are made of the little beasties. He helps lead them to various old school local magicians and sorcerers who deal in the black arts, and they uncover various curses and dirty secrets, going back to a very evil deed performed by their grandfather. Turns out that the medallion allowed the wronged man to know that these kids were descendants of the man who destroyed his life, and now that he's a master sorcerer, he intends to take it all out on them in the here and now, using the worst kind of magic in the world: the dreaded centipede spell.

This movie comes from a very small sub-genre of Chinese horror, where the special effects were cheap and nasty and required the actors to do things no western movie would ever ask. In these films, the actors gobble up various insects and/or vermin and vomit them up on cue to represent the effects of the magic on hand. In the case of CENTIPEDE HORROR, various people puke and projectile vomit five and six inch-long live and squirming centipedes at will. Dozens of the damn things. Not only that, but let hundreds of the multi-legged little fuckers run rampant all over their bodies while pretending (or maybe not) to be bitten to death! In other films of this genre, such as THE DEVIL or CALAMITY OF SNAKES, they puke up worms, maggots, snakes, or lizards! In LEWD LIZARD you don't even want to know what orifice the lizard finds its way into!

It all makes for very uncomfortable and effective viewing. You simply cannot remain unaffected when watching this footage. Yeah, the film's a geek show, but it's also so nasty and vile that it's horrific, and also does the job of being pretty terrifying. As the movie progresses, various other people become possessed by the centipede spells and a battle of sorcerers occurs to combat this. This is when the movie really cranks up, becoming even more outrageous, if that's possible, with the new sorcerers doing things like having enslaved child ghosts become smoke to crawl into a woman's vagina and run out the evil spirit (she then vomits out scorpions!), or another sorcerer who raises dead chickens to send into battle against the centipedes. Hell, a cobra even becomes involved at one point!

You'd be screaming too if your belly was full of scorpians and a ghost just crawled into your vagina!

But even weirder is how the movie steals music from Paul Schrader's 1982 remake of CAT PEOPLE, the theme of which is repeated several times here, as well as incidental music from DAWN OF THE DEAD. While I didn't recognize most of the cast, I swear to god the guy playing the grandfather is the spitting image of a very young Jackie Chan. I doubt it's him, but Jesus, it sure as hell looks like him (edit: Actually found out this movie was released in 1984 but made in the mid to late 1970's so it is VERY possible that IS Jackie Chan as he did not become a household name until 1980 or so).This Sorcerer can control DEAD CHICKENS for spiritual combat. Beat that bitches!

Over at the IMBD boards, there are a half dozen or so reviews of CENTIPEDE HORROR that describe it as something as disturbing as, say, SALO, or CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST. But the movie these reviews describe have nothing to do with the movie I viewed, making me wonder if there's another movie rolling around with the same name. 90% of the scenes described (a dog getting his face eaten off, use of real dead bodies, an ending montage of the surviving characters being tortured, etc) aren't in this movie at all. They all mention a certain film festival, which makes me think a different movie was shown with this title put in the program or something. Or maybe there's some bullshit brewing over there, where some chuckleheads are trying to build some hype around a virtually unknown Chinese goof-fest, making it sound like the end all be all of extreme horror. There are moments that are extreme, that WILL make your skin crawl and make you uncomfortable, but it's not some confrontational classic. It is, however, a roughhouse nasty FUN movie that's highly recommended.

Reviews © Andy Copp

Day #11: Sparkly Vampires are not sexy, but they ARE Funny!

Went for something a little different for Saturday night of the Halloween Horror Challenge...

TAINTLIGHT (2009)
D. CHRIS SEAVER
TEMPE/ LOW BUDGET PICTURES
S.O.V.

Chris Seaver and the LBP gang go for the gusto in thrashing the TWILIGHT Saga to produce one of the funniest movies they have unleashed in many a moon. It would probably be even funnier if I'dseen the movie they are skewering, but the jokes seem pretty straight forward and I had no problem understanding the shots that were being taken. Meredith Host takes up lead role of Stella the new girl back in town who is oh so cool because she is tragically depressed about life. In this film, she moves back in with her comically lecherous father, played by Billy Gaberina, and is reunited with her first "fingerbang" Jack (played by LBP favorite A.J. Stabone). But it's Edgar, (Kurt Indovina), who really gets her panties wet. His passive-aggressive ways, the bubbles that blow from his penis when the sun shines on him, his perfect hair. Soon she figures out that he's a vampire - a pussified vampire that doesn't drink blood and has a freak brother and sister who are sleeping together. Meanwhile, some really bad vampires are stalking the countryside looking for Edgar's limp ass, headed by Razor McBleed (Jesse Green back in the role he made famous in the movie SCROTAL VENGEANCE). You can almost see what's coming. But wait! It turns out Stella's buddy Jack is a werewolf, obsessed with Michael Jackson(!), and he may be vying for heart as well. Awww, Stella is in Love! With his bubble spewing cock!

Seaver goes out of his way to mock the listless sincerity of the TWILIGHT movie, with the pouty performances, longing stares, pale makeup, and color drained videography. One could consider the performances high camp to a degree, but I was assured that the leads are not too far off from the movie being satirized. This is a welcome return to the more fun and silly movies Seaver started out doing, like ANAL PAPRIKA and SCROTAL VENGEANCE, that had a lot less emphasis on the scatological humor and body fluid jokes. Here, there's much more situational comedy and taking the piss out of the movie they are making fun of. Not everything is a hit. The incestuous father bit misses more often than not, becoming creepy more than funny in a few places (though his mustache is good for more than a few laughs) and Stabone's Michael Jackson werewolf doesn't quite make though grade even though he puts on a mighty effort, but those are small bits in a movie that provides lots of laughs. Most welcome is Jesse Green being back, since he proved in several of Seaver's early works that he's a capable character actor who has terrific comic timing. It's very nice to see him back in Seaver's movies, doing what he does best. So, yeah, this isn't really a horror movie, and maybe it doesn't fit the Halloween horror challenge. But it has vampires, werewolves, incest, blood and all that kind of stuff, so it's close enough for me!

Review © Andy Copp

Day #10 is a frat challenge... IN HELL!!!

HAPPY HELL NIGHT (1991)
D. Brian Owens
Anchor Bay
1.85

On Halloween Night in the forties, a priest named Zachary Malius (Charles Craigin) sold his soul. Then in 1961, that same Priest became possessed and viciously murdered seven frat boys who went into a local crypt as part of their initiation games. Malius was put into a protective cell in the local mental institution and forgotten about.

Until 1991, when the party is on baby! Yeah!!!! Whooo!!!!! Those wacky party boys at Phi Delta Kappa know how to celebrate Halloween, or as they call it, Happy Hell Night, like nobody's business! To coincide with their party, they intend to make the new pledges, all one of them(!), do crazy shit to get in. After the suggestion of "fucking him in the ass" doesn't go over so hot, the local tech geek of the frat, Ned Bara (Ted Clark, where did they find this guy?) suggests sending the new pledge to the asylum to get a photo of the crazy, psycho killer inmate! Fun times for all! When the head jock Eric (Nick Gregory) tells his Dad (Darrin McGavin) about the pledge gag it results in probably the funniest, worst directed flashback in the history of film! Starting with blaring music that is a riff on the MIAMI VICE THEME! Then featuring McGavin as a teen played by current indie film fave Sam Rockwell who just grins into the camera in slow motion. Words cannot describe the intense stupidity of the scene. Then it's over and we still don't understand what we just have seen. But what Eric doesn't know is that his girl Liz (Laura Carney) is bumping the uglies of town bad boy Pete (Scott Bell). You know he's a bad boy because he wears a leather jacket and rides a motorcycle. But wait, there's more melodrama because Pete is Eric's brother! Say WHAT?! Eric spots Pete's bike at the local motel and decides to look for his brother in various windows and spots the couple making the beast with two backs. Or, I should say, spots a couple of body doubles, because the gal has huge breasts that do not match Laura Carney at all. A close-up of Laura Carney's face is cut in as she sees Eric through the window. Being the great ho she is, she doesn't tell Pete his brother just saw them fucking! So when he arrives at the party later, his brother punches him out and makes him go on the psycho frat prank with the pledge to prove his worth. (Did I mention earlier, Say What?!!!)

Bad Boy Of the Town Ladies. Watch Out!

Naturally, it goes wrong as the priest gets loose and tears off the hand of the pledgling. So Pete, being the bad boy hero he is, does what an all American badass should do: leaves the guy there to get butchered and runs for it. He makes no attempt to push the monster back into the cell and lock it (which would have been easy) or help the guy. Nope, just makes for splitsville.

Now here is where the movie really goes wrong. The priest is actually really creepy looking. Bald, pale, with total black eyes, he's a real shocker; and when he is on screen, he is a presence to be reckoned with. But you have to remember this was made in 1991, when all horror movies were under the influence of Freddy Kruger and therefor all bad guys have to make witty jokes, this being no exception. So every time he kills someone he has to spit out something funny. Like, he'll kill someone in a car and then say "no parking!" So what menace he has is right out the window, becoming a laugh riot, but not for the right reasons. The frat guys are almost as good. All of them are so interchangeable that you end up losing track of who is who, except that one of them has a broken leg. When Eric decides to bed down one of the girls, he uses the awesome pick up line of "I've seen you here before, wanna fuck". She likes it. But when they get to that point she turns him down because "your little jimmy isn't wearing a raincoat!" to which Eric confusedly asks "you mean a rubba?". So he stumbles out of bed goes downstairs to get one, sees his bottle of vodka and starts drinking instead. Forgetting all about the girl upstairs. Which is fine with her because she proceeds to rob the dumb mook anyway.

BARA is watching you get naked!

The Killer starts working his way through the kids at the party one by one, but no one seems to care. There is a semi-clever subplot were Bara has wired the whole house with video cameras to record the girls getting laid and undressing so he can sell the tapes, but instead ends up using this to monitor what the monster is doing. When the reveal of who the monster is, and the connection to the Frat kings happens, his own greed does him in. There's ridiculous witchcraft/exorcism mumbo jumbo to wrap things up and a Phantasm 2 rip-off ending.

HAPPY HELL NIGHT is incredibly entertaining, for all the wrong reasons.

Day #9 We are all a Book Of Blood

On Day Number Nine I took in this surprisingly faithful Clive Barker movie.


CLIVE BARKER'S BOOK OF BLOOD (2008)
D. JOHN HARRISON
LIGHTENING PICTURES
1.85

This superior adaptation of the first two short stories in Clive Barker's famous collection has been searching for a distributor for some time now. The reasons why mystify me, because the film is actually quite good. Maybe it's because it's a slow burner, maybe it's because it's not about a serial killer or teenagers running from a guy in a mask, so no one knew just how to market it. Maybe it's because of the fit Lion's Gate threw about the last Clive Barker film, THE MIDNIGHT MEAT TRAIN, causing it to be a major flop and no one thought this more cerebral movie would make it in the market place. Who knows what the reasoning is in Hollywood, but the final call here is that this is a rare case of a film adaptation of a book that is both faithful and well-done.

The story is about a paranormal writer who discovers a house in which a teenager girl was brutally killed by some unseen force. This writer (Sofie Ward) also teaches at the local university and meets a young man who was famous as a teen because he had a premonition of his brother's car crash before it happened and therefore becoming a minor celebrity because of his mentalist powers. They team up to investigate the haunting in this house as well as the sexual tension between them. Soon mysterious writings are appearing on the walls while he is locked in the upstairs attic, nude, to sleep. Her and her research partner become convinced there are spirits in the house.

(SPOILERS AHEAD)

But it turns out the young man is taking them for a ride: he's faking proof of the haunting to get into the pants of the woman and make himself important again. Unfortunately, the ghosts there are none too happy with his nonsense and feel no problem about taking it out on his flesh to prove a point. Hence the title of the movie.

The film is a slow-moving character piece that relies on mood, tension, and performance to get the fear across. There are not a lot of huge jump-type scares, but instead a sense of mounting dread that builds as the movie flows along. For me, it was a little hard to judge because I had read the stories it was based on (BOOK OF BLOOD and ON JERUSALEM STREET, respectively) many years ago, and even as a project in screenwriting, wrote my drafts of them in college. So I knew what was coming at all times. But I must say i was impressed with how the shorts were expanded to feature length, without dragging it out too much. There is also a wraparound story about a bounty hunter capturing the young man to skin him a live for a collector that is a pretty nice addition to the story. The finale when all the effects are wheeled out is very effective (though all pretty much CGI), the ghosts are very creepy, and the landscape representing the highways of the dead look remarkably like what I had imagined many years ago reading the books.

The film also has a very adult streak of sexuality to it that is refreshing. Once again carried over from the story, it's nice to see a movie handle sex in an adult manner that is not embarrassing or juvenile. The couple of sex scenes here are rather hot and genuine, serving the story well. There is also a ton of nudity, most of it male (though a lack of penis for the ladies, unfortunately), but lead actress Sofie Ward has nipples that could poke out someone's eye. Very impressive indeed.

If I have a complaint at all, it's that in a few places the script goes all over obvious, emphasizing things far more than necessary for the dumb people in the audience. For example, the entire crux of the movie rests on the idea that the dead have "highways" on which they walk through the after life. This is explained in a bit of unneeded narration over the opening credits. Dummy narration, as I call it, that doesn't need to be there for any reason whatsoever, because as soon as the movie proper opens the main character EXPLAINS this again onscreen. In the last third of the movie, Sofie Ward's character explains it again. And then finally the last line of the movie explains it AGAIN, but with a further riff to wrap it up. So basically it is explained four different times for the dumbasses in the audience who can't grasp what's going on. Which sucks, because the rest of the movie is not that pandering.

Otherwise,the film is a pretty crisp, solid rendering of two of Barker's better short stories. Now if someone will get down to doing THE SKINS OF THE FATHERS, JAQUELIN ESS HER LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT and SON OF CELLULOID, all will be right with the world. (Okay that someone needs to be me, so someone get to financing those projects for me right now!!!)

Day #8 There is something in my guts

For Day number eight I took in some low budget D.I.Y. horror goodness

TAPEWORM (2009)
D. Brian Hirschbine
Abortion Bin Productions
S.O.V. 16 X 9

Thank god there are creative people left working in the D.I.Y indie horror scene today. For a little while there it was beginning to look like it was all getting washed up in the tide of who could make the most "extreme" stuff to out do each other, regardless of things like plot, story or characters. Then along came people like Andrey Iskanov, and over here stateside Brian Hirschbine, to prove that low budget horror film making is still looking to break barriers that are more than just gore. These are young turks willing to push their very concepts to the limit, regardless of the tools at their disposal, reminding us that ideas are the most important thing.

TAPEWORM basically takes the image from VIDEODROME when James Woods gets the betamax tape jammed into his guts to reprogram him and runs with it. Take equal parts Cronenberg body horror, TETSUO mutation psychosis, and a huge dollop of Neo film Noir and stir it all around into a blood cocktail of pseudoscience laced with a bullet written with snuff and you have a close proximity of what this movie is aiming at. The movie follows a P.I. named Frankie who gets a call from a fellow P.I. in trouble. But when he finds her it's too late. She's just a nude corpse in the woods, gutted and filled with audio tape. Quite literally - the stuff is spilling out of her wounds along with her guts. He even finds a mini cassette jammed in her mouth. In his investigations, a Panda-faced mutant attacks him and shoots him up with some drug, which causes him (or perhaps the viewer?) some flashbacks of a nude killer (in a furry panda mask) raping and killing a woman. This continues throughout the movie and gets progressively more vile with each flashback, until she is literally a pile of guts on the floor. Soon, Frankie is mutating with cables exploding from his arms and circuit boards becoming exposed on his body. A hole opens on his abdomen, with all these wounds suppurating and spewing his old body's contents at every turn. He goes to his "company's" mechanic who knows what this is. It's a "recording virus" used to monitor people and record their thoughts, and whereabouts. The mechanic does a nasty surgery and removes the parts and miles of magnetic recording tape that has developed inside of Frankie. But soon a doppelganger of the other Female P.I. manages to infect him again and he's on the run as he discovers he's much more intimately linked to this whole situation that he ever imagined.

The movie is WAY more complex than even that quick paragraph makes it sound, with twists, turns, and lots of characters coming and going, turning out to be doubles or not who we think they are. The whole time the main character is mutating into a flesh/machine hybrid for some higher purpose dealing with audio and video tapes that seem to have replaced actual human interactions for some secret cabal of people. As he mutates he still stumbles around on the job until the final reveal brings it all into focus in a fairly disturbing way.

I was digging the whole Raymond Chandler meets Cronenberg thing in TAPEWORM a lot, but I wasn't digging the snuff film like flashbacks with the guy mutilating and raping the girl. I just felt like that was an angle every other underground horror films has done to death. But then the climax of this movie comes full circle and makes it all make sense, turning the premise into something different. Or a different take on the idea I should say, presenting something fresh and really thoughtful on those ideas that made it all work well. I was duly impressed and suddenly understood how the movie couldn't have worked without those scenes. This is one of the most ambitious D.I.Y. movies I have seen. In plot, structure, and in effects, as well. Many of the effects obviously could have used more money to pull off, but they are still startling and impressive in design. There is a richness of imagination here from script to screen that is rare in this day and age.

My only complaints with the movie are the pacing. I realize that in going with the noir thing, that a certain methodical pace is required. But the movie sits at close to two hours and there is a lot of excess around the edges of scenes. Just extra shots, or shots that run too long, making it feel like it drags in places, when it should be moving along. And, damn, what is with all those cigarettes? Everyone smoking all the time was literally making me sick! I know it is a noir thing, though.

One more thing: J.C. Howe isn't in it enough. She was so terrific in BLACK ICE that I was sad that her part was so small here. Hopefully the next one she'll be on screen more.

Thank god for movies like this that show the indie underground to be alive and kicking ass. I've only seen two movies from Hirschbine and company and they both were quite good. This one was a huge step up from the already good BLACK ICE. So I look very forward to what they do next!

I couldn't find a trailer for TAPEWORM so here is the trailer for Hirschbine's previous movie BLACK ICE.